Parker Posey is delightfully weird. But you probably knew that. “They don’t know what to do with me out here,” she tells us in her new memoir, You’re On an Airplane. We don’t know what to make of her either. And that’s exactly the appeal.
Like the actress herself, the book is nothing like your standard celebrity fare. What gossipy revelations the book does dish up deal with the idiosyncrasies and small charms of celebrities and personae she’s known and worked with, from Nora Ephron and Shirley MacLaine to Joaquin Phoenix and Liev Schreiber. They’re the sort of details a lesser storyteller would cut, but Posey’s different. She has the Indie eye.
The book itself plays out on the page like an intimate performance you’re privileged by chance to have caught. And that’s exactly how she’s framed it: We’re totally captive in a chance encounter with her, as luck would have it sealed in an in airplane next to her 300 pages of delightful, if pixilated, monologue—including punny sidebars and the occasional family recipe. Fans of Christopher Guest’s improvised mockumentaries, the oddball coming-of-age epic Dazed and Confused, and Noah Baumbach’s Kicking and Screaming will easily recognize her voice.
And won’t be too shocked to discover she’s a goofy hippie in several of the usual ways—a seeker drawn to yoga and ceramics, who regards her dog Gracie as something rather more than a member of the family. Still, veganism is a punchline she knows exactly what to do with. Christopher Guest, as she pauses mid-monologue to note, would too. We learn she has a twin brother: “I make a twin for myself whenever I play a part,” she writes. And that her Southern upbringing, hilarious parents (her father was a “comedian without a venue,” made even funnier by his silly-sounding surname), and a glamorous grandmother who dreamed of Hollywood prepared her for supreme comic absurdity as the Indie Queen of the 1990s.
She’s so famous for bringing a certain tilt and consistent intensity to other people’s stories, movies written by men mostly, that it’s a wonder we hadn’t ever heard from her this directly before. The form, “A Self-Mythologizing Memoir,” per its subtitle, has been waiting for her.
The timeliness of You’re On an Airplane’s publication can’t pass without note, either. Posey has worked, not altogether seamlessly, with Louis C.K. as Liz, a manic pixie love interest on his high-brow sitcom and in a recent duo of Woody Allen films: Irrational Man and Cafe Society. She leaves each man’s sex scandal mainly to subtext. But she’s too slyly direct to ignore the problem: She compares Allen to cruelly manipulative great men gone before, though reveals their working together went well on the whole. And she leaves it up to us to decide how badly C.K. mistreated her when he turned their real-life romance into a love interest for his character, a woman more like Posey herself than any character she’d ever played, only to have her disappear and abruptly die. If she felt any semblance of righteous comeuppance at C.K.’s #MeToo “reckoning,” Posey doesn’t tell us, but she tells us enough that we wouldn’t blame her if she had.
She makes herself mightily vulnerable, writing things like—“I’d had this fantasy that after I turned thirty, I’d become Mariska Hargitay or another womanly-type woman, instead of the impish woman-child I’ll remain forever. I’d always feel the same and I’d never exactly fit in.” But the structure of the memoir sets us up to laugh at her while she laughs at her barest self, that is, at the hilarious and bizarre lady reciting recipes from memory between anecdotes from film sets and instructing her airplane seatmate to wear her hair in a turban.
She seems to have pulled off the sort of same baldly self-aware survival tricks on every stage. In her high-rolling Indie years, at once a creative peak and a fiscal valley, she found $1.75 in her bank account and presented the ATM receipt with a flourish to Nora Ephron, who was directing her at the time, in exchange for a crisp $100 bill. Later, in the mid-aughts, when the Indie wave that Posey rode was dead, she threw a jarringly stupid script down the hall and out into the atrium at the powerful Creative Artists Agency, nicknamed the Death Star—sinister connotations of which have only amplified in the wake of the Weinstein Effect.
It’s no surprise that Posey most loves being known for Guest’s mockumentaries like Best in Show and Waiting for Guffman. A five-year-old boy in upstate New York burst out laughing when his father pointed to Posey and said, “That’s the crazy dog lady from Best in Show.” “Nothing makes me happier than a five-year-old laughing at a grown woman acting like a five-year-old,” she writes. There’s more of her original craft in these improvised performances, too, than in any scripted film. It’s why the cast of Best in Show, when they saw the finished film, “weren’t laughing as much as calculating or comparing what was shot to what was sacrificed to move the plot.”
But Posey is also a natural genius at self-parody: “People are so funny when they don’t know what they’re saying,” she says in an appreciation of Guest’s comedic vision, her surface-level target being everyone but us, while her actual target is of course her discursive airborne self. She is at her best when crafting and becoming these delightfully ridiculous characters; or at least that’s how her public knows her. The fact that she does the same so stylishly in her own memoir, and apparently in her life as well, make the book sublimely entertaining—and yet also utterly natural, and unsurprising.
